Jonathan Thirkill, founder and CEO of Customer Experience Optimisation enterprise Boostify, shares what a week in his working life is all about…
Monday
With another week underway, I’m excited for the opportunities that lie ahead and start my morning off by taking my dog, Oscar, for an early walk – to wake us both up!
I’m into my fitness and health, so I take my vitamins and creatine before heading into our Leeds office from my Harrogate home – I’m also accompanied by a strong blast of ‘Hot Hits UK’ via Spotify.
After I’ve settled into my work, it’s straight on to sorting emails, prioritising tasks for the day and planning the week ahead. I like keeping Monday as meeting-free as possible. I find that this is a great time to tick off jobs and focus on our platform’s strategic product improvements to boost client performance.
However, there is one important call today with our development team. We use this time to plan any enhancements and set firm deadlines towards our latest release. After completing my tasks for the day, it’s off to the gym and on with some calisthenics exercises – I can often be found upside down doing a handstand!
Tuesday
It’s an early start today and a 6am train journey from Harrogate to London – with a Starbucks coffee in hand – for a client event and introductions to some of The Big Smoke’s agencies.
Whilst on the train, I run through plans and next steps with my business partner, Michael Ward. We catch-up and tweak our presentation deck to ensure everything is on point and relevant to the audience we’ll be speaking to today.
After a successful trip and day of meetings, I venture back to King’s Cross Station, this time with my obligatory LEON ‘Chicken Satay Hot Box’ – it’s so good! I then use my return journey to work through a flurry of emails and make sure I’m up to date before getting home and eventually logging off for the evening.
Wednesday
I’m back into my fitness regime today and begin with a personal training session at 7am at The Fitness Garage, in Harrogate. I’m currently working on strength and resilience which means a painful 100 push-ups, 75 bar dips and 50 pull-ups – it’s a killer workout, but I love it!
Wednesdays are typically a different kind of day for me because they gives me chance to head over to the family businesses, Age Partnership, and sister firm Pure Retirement. I’m involved in supporting innovative, technology-focused projects for both organisations and enjoy working for companies operating in a completely different industry to Boostify’s marketing sector.
Having caught up with the directors from both businesses, I leave the organisation to go to our Boostify offices for 2pm. It’s now time to work with Michael on our follow-up approach to maximise the new business leads we generated from yesterday’s London event.
Thursday
I’m back at Boostify this morning because we’re expecting a new client to ‘go live’, so I’m jumping between commercial and technical support to ensure everything goes smoothly. Moments later, we’ve had success – the code is live!
It’s important that I’m hands-on during Boostify’s expansion because I want to make sure our Customer Experience Optimisation campaigns are successfully launched and that clients are extremely happy with our platform.
Following a quick catch-up on and emails, I’m on a call with a new customer called WebEx. Together we’re onboarding a new financial services organisation, so we share the deck online and go through it.
Once I’ve discussed topics to write about on our Boostify ‘medium’ profile, I finish Thursday with another gym session. It’s all about frog stands, handstands and front levers tonight – and I’m pleased to say I’m making progress!
Friday
At this point, I’m sure it’s apparent that I love working out so my week wouldn’t be complete without a personal training session! Fridays are usually a great day for me to work from home and utilise the travel time, so that I can tackle emails and any jobs on my ‘to-do’ list.
This morning, I’m reviewing the progress towards our development goals discussed in my Monday call with the team. Here, I’m able to provide technical feedback, comment on the user experience and write code – it’s so important that I know our product inside and out.
In the afternoon, I spend the last part of my day reviewing any outstanding jobs and emails. I love to finish the week on my inbox being at zero, but I do still tend to work late to achieve this – as I’m sure any business owner can testify. However, it’s also a good chance to reflect on the work achieved over the past seven days, and how I can further improve Boostify’s capabilities to meet Monday head-on.
